Familiar Stranger
by sein Henker
Summary: Jack Harkness' daughter finds out why her mother left Torchwood.


Title: Familiar Stranger  
Summary: Jack Harkness' daughter finds out why her mother left Torchwood.  
Rating: T for violence and non-graphic death  
Word Count: 1,685  
Other Chapters: No  
Disclaimer: The British Broadcasting Corporation owns Torchwood and all related characters, settings, and trademarks. I do not profit in any way from this material.  
Pairings: Jack Harkness/Lucia Moretti (mentioned)  
Contains: Pre-canon setting  
Warnings: Violence, character death

It was strange. Alice could only ever remember being Alice, and her mother was always Mary unless her father slipped up, and if her father slipped up then he got the dirtiest look her mother could manage for it. Alice was Alice, though, always and to both of them. Maybe there had once been a time when he'd called her Melissa, but for as long as Alice could remember... she'd just been Alice. Alice Sangster, who was used to hearing people call her father Jack, but was so in the habit of introducing him, on the rare occasion that she got to, as James Sangster that actually seeing his full name written down made her uncomfortable.

"Shouldn't this have been destroyed or something?" she asked, running her hand over a name that didn't properly feel like hers. Melissa Moretti. It was the name of a familiar stranger. Lucia was like an annoying pet name her father called her mother to make her angry. Jack was just a nickname for James. These weren't real names. There presence in black and white on a very official-looking document didn't make them real names.

Alice's mother shook her head. "They told us it wasn't a significant danger to keep it, as long as we don't show it to anyone. Your father has a copy too, just for old time's sake. It's not a legal document any more. It just..." She shook her head. "It's hard to throw away your baby's birth certificate, even if you get a new one."

"Oh." Alice liked the other one better. It felt more like hers. It matched the narrative about herself that she'd been telling all her life, which seemed so much more believable than the truth that these old documents told.

"It's certainly not any more dangerous for me to keep that than it was for me to let your father stay in contact with you."

Alice twitched slightly. She'd gotten that talk many times in her thirteen years of life. For terribly vague reasons, her father was a dangerous man. She wafted back and forth between finding these little family secrets childishly exciting and comforting, because she knew that her parents could and would kill anyone who ever tried to hurt her, and having brief periods of lucidity about the matter where she realized that her father had probably tortured people before and her mother had entire races of aliens who'd love to see her dead. That was not such a comforting thought. "Could you ever have taken me away from him, though?"

Alice looked over at her mum, and she thought about this for a moment and then smiled. "I don't imagine so. I'd never have forgiven myself. Your father wouldn't have let me, either." Her smile grew slightly, and she looked down and away from Alice. "He wanted you. Never doubt that he wants you. It broke his heart to watch me leave with you, but we both knew there was no life for you in Cardiff. We tried, we really did." She laughed a little. "We had that nice little three-bedroom flat together. It was working, until..."

"What?"

Alice watched her mother suck her teeth and think about this for a minute, but then she gave in. "We knew things had to change when the blowfish attacked the base. It was a fairly normal morning and we never dreamt that anything would happen." She wouldn't meet Alice's eyes. "You have to understand, we used to joke that the base was the safest place in Cardiff for you. Secret, underground, fortified, surrounded by people who'd defend you to the death. Where were we going to find a daycare like that?"

"You brought me in to work with you?!"

"All the time," her mother admitted. "Even if your father and I got called out to take care of something, there was always someone who stayed at the base, so we could just leave you with them. It was sort of a drain on productivity..." She looked back at Alice and smiled, "But our boss didn't mind. He loved you. It brightened morale to have you around, and as long as we kept you from getting into things, which wasn't that difficult with everything stored at least three feet above your head, everything was fine..." She sighed and ran her hand through her hair.

Alice worried her lower lip between her teeth. "Mum, was I kidnapped by aliens or something?"

"No!" she said immediately. Then she sobered a bit. "It could have been so much worse, honestly. Our alarms started to sound and no one but Jack even knew what that meant because the last time they'd gone off was the early 50s. He said it was a break-in, and, well, I ran for you and everyone else ducked for cover, and about seven blowfish aliens bust through the door spraying bullets. I was beneath a table with you in my right arm and a gun in my left hand, and you were screaming and I was sure they were going to come after us because they could hear you, and..." she took a deep breath. "I just remember thinking 'I don't mind dying this way, but what am I doing to my child?' And that was right before one popped under the table. I shot him in the face and he dropped dead, and the whole thing was over in three minutes. All of the blowfish dead. Your father dead on the floor but he took out three of them before they got him. A couple of people injured but no permanent damage done..." She needed another deep breath. "The team doctor started going around examining everyone, logging wounds or at least logging that everyone was fine—"

"What about dad?!" Alice hadn't meant to ask it, but even though she'd been theoretically aware of her father's immortality for the vast majority of her life, and he had her always on the lookout for signs of it manifesting within herself, it was still jarring to hear 'your father was dead on the floor,' in any true story. Even though the events Alice's mother was describing had taken place eleven years ago and Alice had seen her father last week, she still needed some confirmation that he was going to be okay.

"We all just left him on the floor. You have to understand, Alice, we'd all seen your father die so many times, it really didn't worry us any more." She shrugged. "Well, I was just starting to get my heartbeak back down when our doctor came over to me and lifted you from my arms and turned to your personnel file as if it was the most normal thing in the world. You had a personnel file. I completely lost control of myself for a minute. I screamed at the doctor and when he told me he couldn't finish your check-up like this, I left you with him and went to yell at our team leader. He tried to tell me that it was fine; That it didn't mean anything and that you just needed to have one for you to be cleared to enter the base, and that it would be helpful later on when you'd be given access codes to come see us, but..." She shook her head. "At that point I'd already made up my mind, but it erased all doubt. Of course it didn't mean anything then! You were one! But what would it mean in eight years when we needed to investigate a school or something and just conveniently had a child logged as an inactive staff member?" She sighed. "I had you back by the time your dad woke up. He came over to check on us and I just looked at him and all I could say was 'I'm taking her and I'm getting out.' And I didn't even know what that meant at the time. I didn't know how to do it or if you'd ever get to see your father again—there was never any chance of him coming with me. Even if I could talk him into it, I doubt Torchwood would ever let him go—and he didn't know these things either but he just nodded and... It was done. That was my last day of work. It seemed a bit like tempting fate to decide to quit, give two weeks notice, and then keep coming back, so I was just... done. Your father and I started packing things up that night."

"He never tried to get you to stay?"

Alice's mother shook her head. "I think... I'm sure he was scared too, Alice. The last thing he has ever wanted was for you to get hurt, and after what happened... I think it had just hit both of us that you really weren't safe like this, and sure, we could put you in daycare, but you'd still always be the child of two Torchwood operatives and if they followed us back to the base then how long before they started following us home? It was never going to be safe unless we got you out of Cardiff. We were lucky, honestly. The British government was very helpful. Your father knew a few strings to pull to speed things up, and three days later we were in a new house in Wiltshire."

Alice stared down at her birth certificate. That story sounded like the sort of thing that happened in films. One-year-old or not, it certainly seemed like something she ought to remember. That was her life, though. Alice Sangster had a boring life and went to a small school in Wiltshire and had a mum who never let her have any fun and a weird American dad who drove down once or twice a month to take her to the cinema or buy her affection with toys. Some familiar stranger named Melissa Moretti had been in gun fights as an infant and had seen her father die. Probably more than once.

Alice was, honestly, glad she wasn't that familiar stranger.


End file.
